The Children of the Sky

Inside herself, Johanna felt something colder than the water. The packs’ treatment of fragments was her most unfavorite thing about Tines World. “So what happens to them, then? If anyone tries to force them back into the sea—” Her voice rose, along with her temper. Ravna Bergsndot would not put up with that, Johanna was sure. Not if Johanna got to her in time. She turned and began walking quickly back to the agrav flier.

All of Pilgrim turned about and trotted along beside her. “No, don’t worry about that happening. In fact, Woodcarver has a longstanding decree that any survivors be allowed the run of Cliffside village. These patrol packs are waiting for reinforcements, to chivvy the mob into town.”

About a third of the seafarers had already disappeared, trotting off as singletons and duos. They might do better than the fragments Johanna was used to. Frags of coherent packs were generally anxious mental cripples; many starved to death even if they were basically healthy. Elderly singletons, the castoffs, lasted only a short time. Johanna didn’t slow down. An idea was percolating up.…

“You’re planning something crazy, aren’t you?” said Pilgrim. Sometimes he claimed he stayed with her because in a year she did as many weird things as he would see in ten anywhere else. Pilgrim really was a pilgrim, so that was an extreme claim indeed. His memories went back centuries, hazing off into unreliable history and myth. Few packs had traveled their world so much, or seen so much. The price of the adventuring was that Pilgrim was more a surviving point of view than an enduring mind. It was Johanna’s great good fortune that that point of view was currently embodied in someone whose attitudes were so basically decent. Of all the Tines in the world, Pilgrim and Scriber had been the first she’d known. That bit of luck had saved her. Ultimately, it had saved all the remaining Children.

“You’re not going to tell me your plan, eh?” said Pilgrim. “But I bet you want me to fly you someplace.” That was not a difficult thing to guess, considering that Johanna was still walking toward the flier, which was parked—crashed—at the base of a cliff so steep and smooth that no pack or unaided human could hope to climb it.

Pilgrim ran around in front of her, now leading the way. “Okay, then. But keep in mind. The Tropicals can’t live here very well. The packs they make are loose, even when they try to form them.”

“So you’ve lived in the Tropical Choir?” That was something that Pilgrim had never quite claimed.

Pilgrim hesitated. “Well, for a time I lived on the fringes—you know, in the Tropical collectives. The true Choir of the deep jungles would be very quickly fatal for a coherent pack. Can you imagine being surround by such mobs, no one caring to keep a decent distance? Thought is impossible … though I suppose if the stories of nonstop orgies are true, it might be a happy way to dissolve oneself. No, I just meant that these shipwrecks have happened before. We’ll have a year or two of nuisance, far more singletons wandering around than normal old age and accidents would account for—more even than after the war with Steel and Flenser. But eventually the problem will take care of itself.”

“I’ll bet.” They were walking between house-sized boulders now, scrambling over lesser rocks that had fallen in between. This was not the safest place to promenade. All those rocks had come from somewhere above them. Sometimes after a spring thaw you’d see the rocky avalanches adding to the talus. At the moment, that was just a passing thought in the back of Johanna’s mind, another reason to fly away from here. “So after a year or two, these poor animals are mostly dead and Woodcarver’s folk have solved the problem?”

“Oh no, nothing like that. Or almost nothing like that. Over the centuries, Woodcarver and her people learned that if they waited till a good chill autumn and a surface current that was mainly southerly, you could get rid of most of the survivors in an almost friendly way: just repair their rafts or make new ones. After all, it’s not that hard to make junkwork like that out of the flotsam that is always rolling in.”

“You mean the surviving Tropicals can just be led aboard and put out to sea?”

“Not quite, though sometimes that’s enough. What the Old Woodcarver learned was that the Tropicals are like jaybirds. They like shiny things. They like firemakers—which doesn’t make sense since those go bad so fast in humid weather. They like all sorts of silly things. And long ago, folks around here figured what those things were. So pile the trinkets up on the rafts. Put some food aboard—and if the tide is right you can coax the remaining Tropicals aboard. Then just push them out into the southerly stream. Hei, problem solved!”